In short: Terrorgram (1990)

This anthology movie directed by one-time filmmaker Stephen M. Kienzle start each of its three episodes off with the off-screen voice of James Earl Jones, out to earn some pocket money by uttering nonsensical variations on “Twilight Zone”-style spooky tale introductions. The actual stories are rather more in the style of “Tales from the Crypt” than of the Serling joint, with terrible things happening to people who deserve it. Each of these arseholes gets a visit from a “mysterious” delivery man (Steven Field), who, in a plot twist one really doesn’t see coming, delivers a package to them, instead of the telegram the title pun suggests (but then all the puns here are terrible anyway), making the care and craft that has gone into the writing pretty clear.

Said packages do of course lead to more or less terrible fates. To wit: a misogynist director lands in the world of one of his films, only that here, classical male and female B-movie roles are reversed, which of course does not end well for him; a bitchy TV anchor woman runs over a little kid and flees, and learns how a Jack-in-the-box feels; an alcoholic shitheel who abuses his family and denunciated other kids to get them shipped to Vietnam when he was young makes a trip into an appropriately nightmarish version of the ‘Nam.

When it comes to cheap, shoddily made anthology movies in the immortal style of “Tales from the Crypt” and other EC comics (and their TV versions), one could do worse than Terrorgram. Sure, the film falls into the usual EC-alike trap of believing that because this style’s surface nastiness is so easy to copy, it’s actually easy to do it well. It isn’t, and consequently, the film at hand never manages to get the more subtle points of the style down.

It is, however, pretty fun – using the word good oversells things a wee bit – because there’s a nasty bit of pleasure to derive from nasty things happening to nasty people at most times, even if it is unpleasant to admit. And the film really does its best to make its victims as despicable as possible, and their comeuppances as weird and nasty as the filmmakers’ strange imaginations can go. The first episode is the film’s best there, Jerry Anderson making the director as grotesquely sleazy as possible, and the actresses torturing him clearly having a whale of a time doing all the stuff only men are allowed to do in most movies of this style. Which helps make up for everyone’s dubious acting, as does the conscious broadness of everything going on. And hey, it’s a more subversive story than you’d expect from an ultra-cheap early 90s anthology movie.

The other two tales never reach the heights of absurdity and fun of the first one, though number two does have a delightfully bizarre ending (even if you see it coming, as you will), and the third one recommends itself with scenes of a badly made-up undead doing really bad sarcastic dialogue.


So Terrorgram delivers rather more than the nothing I expected from it, being fun in a pleasantly trashy manner while keeping in the traditions of American low-brow horror. That’s a compliment.